Red Sox hoping Rusney Castillo delivers

Saturday

Aug 23, 2014 at 8:34 PM

By Bill Ballou TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

BOSTON — Life has been a regular Lewis & Clark expedition for Rusney Castillo these last couple of years.

The newest Red Sox center fielder has defected from his native Cuba, been banned from plying his trade back home, gone through a series of auditions with several major league teams, and signed some agreements that will eventually lead to his savings account growing by some $72 million or so over the next seven years.

Since Castillo has joined the Red Sox, there is no guarantee his life is going to get much simpler. Boston is in a death spiral of failure as the 2014 season winds down and whether it is fair to him or not, Castillo is expected to fix a lot of what's wrong with the Red Sox starting next year.

While Castillo may play in Boston this year, it is too late to do anything about 2014. Because he was suspended from his league in Cuba for trying to defect, Castillo has not played for about 1˝ years.

That did not deter the Red Sox, however.

"We had seen him play in Amsterdam in 2011, then in Taiwan in 2012," general manager Ben Cherington said. "The last several weeks in Florida, we had a chance to know him better. This is an exciting player, a combination of speed and power. He's had a pretty strong track record in Cuba."

Boston plans to use the new guy as a center fielder.

"He's got a lot of skills," Cherington said, "and he has a chance to impact the game in a number of different ways. He's got solid power….can play defense. We see him as a very good major league player and part of a winning team in Boston.

This is really the first time the Red Sox have outbid other teams for the services of an established foreign player since the signed Daisuke Matsuzaka out of Japan before the 2007 season. Matsuzaka helped Boston win the World Series that year, but overall that did not seem like a wise use of John Henry's money.

Castillo is 27 and a position player, so Boston is trusting that his performance will be easier to project than Matsuzaka's was. However, he was not easier to scout than Matsuzaka since Americans are not allowed to travel to Cuba by regular means.

"There were two pieces to it," Cherington said of the process. "Obviously there was the visual, subjective evaluation., which we've been doing intensely over the last several weeks.

"Beyond that, this is someone we had identified and recognized in Cuban, and in international play. We've been evaluating him for a number of years, and we've done quite a bit of mining whatever data is available to us from out of Cuba. And we are getting more precise in our ability to translate and see what that means."

Castillo, who said on several occasions he has admired the Red Sox for a long time and is honored to be part of the organization, does not have a work visa yet, so getting him on a roster will take time.

The newcomer is headed back to Miami for a couple of days, then will go over to Fort Myers.

The Sox hope he can play some minor league games before coming to Boston, and they hope he can make his Red Sox debut in September.

This year's failures did not force the Sox to sign Castillo, Cherington said.

"It would not have changed our evaluation of him," Cherington said. 'You make decisions based on all the information you have at the time. We are trying to build a winning team as quickly as we can and feel that Rusney can be a big part of that

"This is not a decision about next week or next April. We signed him for the long term."

So, help is on the way for the Red Sox. How much help a player who has never faced major league pitching, and who the team's scouts have only seen glimpses of can be — that's something that won't get answered for at least a year — but $72 million should buy a lot of help.